Sam's Boyfriend Asahidake

Alright. I retconned this into my post about Asahidake after the fact, but the video is so fine and Sam did such a good job that I need to give this thing a post of its own. This is shot on the highest mountain in Hokkaido, and one of the finest mountains I've boarded on in my time here. This is one of the reasons I stayed in Japan for two years and why I'm fortunate that I get to leave this place in the summer. Were I to have to terminate my contract in the deep, fluffy, white of February, I'm not sure I'd have the strength. To be able to leave this place, I've had to ready myself for the possibility that snowboarding will never be this fantastic in any other part of the world.

Oh, and Sam's the one in the blue pants, green pack, and white jacket.

All's Well. I was on the Mountain.

First off: I'm fine. Completely. Didn't know there'd been an earthquake until it exploded all over my Facebook just after 14:50 on Friday afternoon. I didn't feel a thing, and when I turned to my co-worker at the Board of Education to tell her that there'd been a big earthquake down in Iwate-ken, she seemed completely unperturbed. I left work at three like I was supposed to, rode a bus into Yoichi (mostly along the Sea of Japan coast), and then jumped another bus inland to Kutchan where I'd be meeting Mark, Alistair, and Ross for some nightboarding at Hirafu.


The view from a bus in Hokkaido at pretty much the exact time that the world was falling down.

If it hadn't been for my phone, I never would have gotten any indication that anything was amiss in other parts of Japan.

It was that uneventful here. When I spoke to Mark, he told me that he hadn't felt it, either, over in Iwanai. Ross and Alistair had felt it on the mountain, near Kutchan, but they had no idea about the scale of the craziness that was going on down south.

Niseko Winter Meet & Niki Student Boarding

I'm trying to go back and fill in the giant gap I've left here since about mid-February, so these are going to be mostly photos.

Friday night and Saturday were spent with the HAJET folks, taking in the winter meeting at Freedom Inn in Hanazono (near Niseko). It was at this meeting last year that Heather and I had quit all our dicking about and had finally gotten together, so the meeting held a certain salience for us. Personally, it was also salient as it was at the winter meeting in Furano last year that I'd taken on the role of HAJET Social Coordinator, and next to all of the madness that I get up to with my friends and the sun-eclipsing light of my elementary school kids, being a part of the HAJET Prefectural Council has been one of the most fulfilling parts of this JET experience. So it was with a bit heavy heart that I accepted that my time with the council was at an end as our council handed off responsibility to the newly-elected council, and I handed my Social Coordinator role off to Andy Suvoltos.

Sentimental bullshit or not, we still managed to have ourselves a good 'ol weekend between the parting with all the other Hokkaido ALTs and the snowboarding.

Alpha Tomamu and Anniversaries

Better late than never...

How was your weekend?

Ours at Alpha Tomamu was a fit of fantasy thanks to our over-generous Japanese teacher friends springing to put Heather and I up in that mad suite with the jacuzzi and the sauna and the three rooms.

Wild Things in The Woods

Nightboarding over at Hirafu, after we'd finished giving our Snow Festival/Yuki Matsuri Tour snowboard lessons, Mark--in his fox suit--takes us down through the trees just between runs.

We must seem some wondrous wild things in the woods to the casual observer: galumphing down through the powder in our furry suits. Fox and Pikachu, Gizmo and Marimokori with the occasional flashes of metal and fiberglass at our feet. We must look like animist spirits scared to leave the safety of the trees as we only ever break from them briefly before barreling back into them.
Down through mist and snow.
Down the paths only Wild Things know.

If, on an icy night, a boarder

Niki Skijo, Thursday, 5pm.

I've been fortunate out here in Japan to have some really awesome ALTs really close to where I live. Though I don't spend that much time with my closest ALT over in Yoichi, the next one down the road in Niki has come to be a good bud of mine. Perry often accompanies us on our mad adventures around the island. He's a very laid back dude from Edmonton who arrived in Japan at the same time as our JET group back in the summer of 2009, and he always seems to be game for pretty much anything...particularly when it involves snowboarding.

As Perry's fruit-growing town of Niki (know for its apples, mostly, but also its cherries) is only about an hour, at most, by bus from Furubira, I jumped on an invitation from Perry last week to come in for some night snowboarding at the tiny Niki skijo. In Hokkaido, pretty much any town with a hill near it has its very own ski hill. However, in cases like Furubira's, or neighbouring Bikuni's, many of the ski hills in the smaller towns no longer operate due to a lack of steady enough business to keep the lifts running. Fortunately Niki has managed to keep its skijo open while the rest of us have been shutting ours down.

Niki hasn't got much in the way of lifts (only a single, one-person chair), but the hill is planned out in such a way as to make maximum use of that one dinky lift. As a mid-winter warm spell had hit these parts on Wednesday and had driven the temperatures above freezing for the first time in what seems like months, all of the snow heaped about had started melting. This meant that, by the time Perry and I reached the hill on Thursday evening, the temperatures had dropped back down below zero and the surface conditions were pretty damn icy.

Fortunately, I managed not to fall flat on my ass where it counted, despite the runs at Niki being my first on my new Ride Revolt bindings (which I had to buy to replace the 10-11 year-old Burton bindings that had come with my 8000円 Charger board). I imagine that would have been significantly less fun than all of the hurtling down the hill we did on the slick surface. We were able to find a few pockets of powder...ish, but the warm temperatures had caused it all to go heavy, making turning in it a herculean task.

It was a really good night of boarding, even if the conditions weren't perfect. We were able to get in about three solid hours (which felt a lot longer), and it was enough to convince me to head back to Niki when the conditions are a little better.

The sun setting just as I arrived at Niki Skijo.

Same, as seen through rose-coloured goggles ;)

Perry on the littlest lift that could, above the icy, icy slope below.

2010 - 2011 Mountain Day 11

Kiroro (An Undying Winter)

Winter exists, my love.

It has been hiding from us at the heart of Hokkaido, sheltered in from the coasts and the seas, in places you have to brave dangerous high passes to find. From December's first sprinklings you drive up and over mountains and down into the icy full of February.

At summit, you break the clouds momentarily and are reminded of the sun, of the blue sky, and then down you plunge, past other peaks where you can SEE the howl of the white wind as it curls over the top of them like they were so many tiny snow piles.

You dive down through blizzards that make your stomach drop when you look up and can no longer see anything out of the front of the bus, to ski-jos where the white around and the grey above is all so thick that they have to burn night lights in the day time in a vain attempt to glow orange through the soup of it.

It is here that winter has been hiding while we pined away for it for so long: here, hunkered down in these forgotten valleys at island's core, where it may well have waited out the whole of the long, hot summer.

Never melting. Only waiting to blow back out across Hokkaido.

And, from what I've seen here today, there is no doubt that it's coming.

On Sunday, I finally made it out to Kiroro: a surprisingly big ski resort, just inland from Otaru, that I'd been ignoring for no good reason (Niseko blinders?) all of last season. Even with the high winds keeping the gondola and higher courses closed, the resort was still able to open their hooded quad lifts, and one of those took a good fifteen minutes from base to top, which is an indication of how very much mountain Kiroro has to mess around with. The difference between Teine on Saturday and Kiroro on Sunday was quite literally night and day. I went from wet snow and sun/cloud conditions at the former to a gale-force blizzard at the latter. There were points when I was heading down some pretty steep courses at Kiroro and I was convinced that the strength of the wind coming up the hill might just succeed at stopping me in my tracks. By the time I finished my three hours of boarding, large parts of my gear had iced up, and I was starting to feel more than a little cold. It was all very much worth it as Sunday at Kiroro felt a lot more like proper snowboarding than Saturday at Teine had.

2010 - 2011 Moutain Day 2

Season Opener: Teine

Last week I headed to Sapporo for the only mandatory, annual meeting that us Hokkaido ALTs have. The days are taken up by a lot of people from the educational ministry and the Hokkaido Board of Education letting us know how we should be doing our jobs, interspersed with presentations from our co-ALTs who hand out tips for better lessons/activities with our students. However, just as the motto of the JET Programme would tell you, Every Situation Is Different, and as we're only allowed to select two sessions out of the 10-12 offered, and even then we might not be granted admission to the one we chose (based on numbers), finding a session that is applicable to your own very unique situation is a bit of a crap shoot.

For me, the real benefit of the Sapporo Mid-Year Conference (MYC) is the way that it brings all of us Hokkaido ALTs back together for two days. The Ministry folks would tell you that all we ALTs are interested in is getting drunk and showing up, hung over, for the conference sessions. I'd tell you differently, though, since it was very much the social interactions at last year's Sapporo MYC that convinced me to recontract and stay around in my town this year. Informational sessions are all well and good on paper, but it was remembering how many utterly fantastic people there were out there who I still had to get to know and get to hang out with that showed me that one year on JET was not enough. And that recontracting decision often seems like the main concern of the Boards of Education that employ us in our towns, so even if some ALTs do wind up hung over after the Thursday night parties of MYC, maybe that's not too high a price to pay for another ALT like me who saves his BOE the price of a plane ticket by deciding to hang around.

Wow. That was a bit of a JETrant. Sorry about that.

The main point of this was meant to be that, though I headed to Sapporo on Thursday and Friday with a suit bag under one arm, I did it with a board bag under the other. Knowing full well how slow in coming this Hokkaido winter has been, conditions were starting to cool, snow was starting to hang around, and Heather and I were DETERMINED to get in the first mountain day of the season. So determined that, even when I-encumbered with aforementioned suit bag, board bag, and a backpack with my laptop in it-slipped on the ice immediately outside my house and went down hard on one knee, there was no question of walking back five feet to leave the board, and all my boarding junk, at home.

I was tired of waiting, and this season was going to start. Now.

It was that same kind of single-mindedness that drove Kyle and I to drive out to Teine from Sapporo on Saturday morning, in 7-degree-celsius rain. Every other hill within a 2-hour drive seemed to be closed due to lack of snow or wind or a combination of the two, and Teine could only offer us one lift operating on its most bunniest of hills. Heather, being more sound of mind than I, had decided to save her money for boarding at Furano the following weekend, when there was meant to be a lot more snow.

Fortunately Kyle can be just as insanely optimistic as I can when he sets his mind on something, and it was him who was first to bellow "THAT'S SNOW!" while driving us up the mountain to Teine Highland and out of the rain below. By the time we reached the base of the hill, there were definite white, fluffy flakes coming down, but they felt a lot more like rain when we were finally let into the very-packed parking lot. Eventually Lindsay showed up, too, as she is a quick drive from Teine and had been anticipating the coming season as avidly as me, but after about an hour and a half of boarding on the bunny lift, she, Kyle, and I were all pretty soaked.

It had not all been for naught, though, as fairly soon after we'd arrived they started the longer hooded quad lift running, and by the time the three of us turned in for lunch and a chance to warm up/dry off, the long line for that longer lift had started filing through and riding up the mountain.

The after lunch period was a little less wet as the clouds broke up and the wet snow held off. It was also far more wintery at the top of Teine once we were able to get up the quad lift. A glorious return to the mountains it wasn't, but it did well enough in playing the part of a good practice run to help the three of us remember what we were supposed to do on our boards after a long summer off. It was also good to run into similarly-minded folk on the hills, such as Perry, his buddy Wing, and Jess and Brian Lagis.

2010 - 2011 Mountain Day 1

Snow Tomorrow.

The Japanese speak forecasts like they're a certainty. I guess that's partly because forecasts over here seem to be a bit more reliable than what passes back home. Where in Canada you'd get a "we're likely to see snow later this week, though it may just appear as rain showers."; in Japan it's more of an "it will snow Tuesday. In the morning. Approximately 8am."

...which is what I've been hearing from friends and co-workers since about last Wednesday or Thursday when the yuki mushi were really showing up in force. It's the kind of prediction I'd brush off at other times as being unreliable, but I've started to really believe this one. That's likely because I've got myself so wound up for snow this year. While the autumns in Hokkaido are mild and relatively rain free, they can hardly compare to the deep, fluffy, neverendingwhite of the winters.

Hell, I've been looking forward to the snow since some point in August. When I try to rationalize it, asking why I'm this wound up about it this year when I wasn't nearly so excited last year, all I can come up with is that now I know what to expect: a winter like nothing I've seen back home. Or maybe it's because back in January of last year I finally figured out how to enjoy the snow. I've loved snow since I was a kid and have always gone for long walks in it or burrowed tunnels through it, but I had last winter while riding a chair lift, alone, up Teine. I was staring out at the patchy blizzard blowing over the mountain, at the falling wisps of white that it shook free from the evergreens, and all of a sudden I was overwhelmed with the feeling that this had been what I was always looking for.

All of those long walks under street lamps made somehow more material in the cones of flakes they illuminated; all of that aimless lying in snow drifts in warm gear watching it fall around me: I had always been looking for a way to be out in the snow--looking for a reason to spend hours and hours bathed in it. Everything I'd done before had never seemed sufficient. Even skiing never gave me the right kind of immersion I was subconsciously craving. For some reason I can't explain, snowboarding does. Between the speed of the descent and the subtly clicking quiet of the lift; between the faceplants in snow banks and the barely landed "jumps" (if they can even be called that) off of low moguls; somewhere in the middle of all that I've found just the mix I never knew I was looking for.

Now that I've found that perfect way to be out in the blizzard; now that I found a place where it seems to snow more than I could ever imagine, all I want to do as the days get short and the nights get cold is to be able to take advantage of this coming winter, from its very beginning to its very end.

In that anticipation, all I can do is sit here and hope that all of those Japanese people who are so certain of snow tomorrow are right.

Spring Snowboarding

I’ve been getting a bit behind on these things this month, but I figured that since stuff was still going on, I should endeavour to catch up.

Least there be any doubt, there is still snow in Hokkaido. Heather and I struck out to make the most of it by getting in our last boarding weekend of the season at Hirafu/Niseko. Though the HAJET musical/after party/late night/our 11 am check out time and plans to meet up with Sonomi and Mark for lunch in Kutchan all conspired to keep us off the hill for most of the weekend, we did get in a few hours of boarding on Saturday.

It was definitely the latest in the season that I have ever been out in the snow in a meaningful way, but I would say the conditions were as good as my last visit to Niseko, if not a little better since, well, we could actually use a lot of the hill. A guide had described the base as “corn snow,” and I have to say that I far prefer it to the slushy alternative that Ontario yields late in the season. Though it’s not as forgiving when you fall as the standard Niseko powder, its granular consistency makes turning a breeze.

Foolishly, I got either over confident or ambitious and decided to leave Heather in the low lands while I rode the lifts as high as they would go on Hirafu that day, heading to the top of the peak chair. It was somewhere I hadn’t been since that first weekend on a board with Mark back in January, and I was determined to show up the mountain with how far I’d come in the interim. From near the peak, I was treated to a spectacular view of Mount Yotei, Kutchan, and the surrounding towns…

…but it was all down hill from there{sic}. While the lower elevations with their corn snow were in some happy transition between winter and spring, the peak area held on to winter tenaciously. This late in the season, there hadn’t been enough snow to coat it in powder, and what snow there was had frozen up into a slick sheet on one side and a rocky field of micro glaciers on the other. Being unable to get much purchase on the slick sheet, I took my chances with the glacier field and wound up going down hard on one of the ridges of ice knee-first. I could almost hear the mountain laughing at me and my confidence.

In all, though the boarding was fun, seeing the mountain so far along in its melt was a little sad. Every time I’ve rolled up on Niseko this season, it has been a postcard example of a winter wonderland. The consistent soft white of it has inspired Heather to draw comparisons to a wintery Narnia. And yet now, though the majority of the runs are still good and snowed in, the trees and the cliffs peek out along their peripheries a little too much these days, killing our ice age fantasies more and more. It’s like coming back to what was once a perfect, crisp ice sculpture, only to find it a far, sagging, watery cry of what it once was. You can still see what you saw in it, but the loss makes it almost not worth the second glance. I guess I’m happy to be done with the mountain for this season, happy to allow it to return to summer on its own, happy to wait until December before I return to it for another run.

But I will be back in December, and I will ride back up to that peak, and the joke’s on the mountain because this time she will be mine.

Oh yes, she will be mine.

Mountain Day 12

Alpine Equinox

Me and Becca, Roz, Maggie, and Kyle spent the first day of spring on the mountain. Well, we spent the day before and the day after on the mountain and would have done so on the Vernal Equinox as well were there not a first-class, hurricane-strength blizzard raging across the mountain. It was a good weekend to be among friends, though, shacked up in a warm little school house hostel while the storm kept us from what we'd intended.

With the impending equinox, the melt had begun in the low parts of the group of mountains that make up Niseko. As the snow turned from ice to water to vapour, it began to slowly release the spirits of summer and autumn that it had taken captive all that time ago when it first fell in November. They swarmed up, newly awakened as spirits of spring, and they wove themselves into clouds and fog, their movements slow, languid as their sharp spirit minds were still waking from their long hibernation.

As the day wore on, the warmth from below rose, beating back the alpine chill, and the spirits thawed out and awoke ever higher on the mountain, spreading their still, sleepy mist and crowding in thick between one another. By the late afternoon, they had grown so thick in the air around the mountain that they began to rain down upon it again as water. But the sun soon set behind the clouds, and as the warmth went out of the day, the water turned back to snow.

And then sometime in the night, those spirits awoke fully, and they realized that the cold ghosts of winter were trying to imprison them anew—to lock their bright hearts away for an ice age, if they could. And the bright spirits of spring weren’t about to allow it, and in the dark witching hours, they took their warm resistance to where winter huddled, at the very peaks of those mountains.

At the peaks, they clashed: at Niseko, at mountains all over Hokkaido and down into snowy Tohoku. Throughout the night and into Sunday, the first day of spring, the spirits of spring and the ghosts of winter fought, and their clashes set off wind storms all across the snowbound stretches of Japan. The combination of cold and warm setting off typhoon winds that kicked up snow to dance in the air until one could almost see the forms of titans in it.

As little snowboarders huddled in their schoolhouse hostels, outside the seasons raged against each other all day and long into the night. Those brave enough to venture out in low-lying areas did so in full snow gear, and none were allowed up onto the mountains, where the true battles were being fought.

By early Monday morning, most of the fight had been fought out, and the first vestiges of sunlight began to beam through the torn clouds. The winds would gust up form time to time, snow would pelt down, and those brave enough to take to the higher altitudes on the selectively open mountain lifts were treated to glimpses of the kind of driving whiteout that can cause even the most hardy of mountaineers to curl up and go to ground in the face of it.

The mountains opened more and more by the hour, and by the afternoon, when sun and blue sky shone strongly through intermittent, patchy clouds, it was clear that spring had won out in the clash.

But when you rode the lifts as high as they would go on that day, to the foot of the still-shut peak chairs, and you witnessed the blizzards that would blow in fitfully, temporarily eclipsing the white peak, there was no doubt that, though they’d begun their retreat from the low lands, the icy ghosts of winter still reigned at the mountain’s summit.

Mountain Days 9, 10